“A wandering Aramean was my father…” (Deuteronomy 26:5)
I have recently met a pair of “Christian nomadists.” I do not think that I had ever met a “nomadist” before. I met them in the streets of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia – a country filled with portable gers, roaming herds, and nomads on horseback. These, however, were visiting missiologists. One was doing research on nomadic peoples around the world. The other was preparing for a workshop on ministry among nomadic peoples.
The Mongolian church, they explained, has grown broadly in recent years. Indeed it has! It numbers today, perhaps, ten thousand members – all of whom have come to Christ in the last ten years. But the church has not grown correspondingly deep. It wavers, sometimes, in contrary “winds of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14). It struggles to maintain unity. It must learn to grow deeper as it grows numerically.
The great challenge before this young church, in the estimation of my missiologist friends, is to develop models of authentic “Christian nomadism.” The church has arrived in several important Mongolian cities. But few churches are found in the countryside – or meet in gers, pack up two or three times a year, and move with their flocks to other pastures, as nomads do. Mobile nomadism is at the heart of Mongolian culture; until the church becomes nomadic, it cannot grow deep in Mongolia.
My missiologist friends made an appeal for missionaries willing to live as Christian nomads in the Mongolian steppe. It would be a grand and difficult adventure. It would require hardy, intrepid folk, willing to forgo the comfort of life in the city for a nomadic life in the countryside. And not just for an evening – as I ventured while in Mongolia recently. But for a pair of years, let’s say, or longer. It would be a full-time assignment: learning the language, learning to survive on goat meat and salt tea, learning to put up and take down a ger and move along with the seasons and the flocks. I wonder who is up to it? (Maybe some intrepid individual reading this column…!)
In a way, I think, this is the same sort of challenge facing us here, in the west. Our churches, too, are broad but not deep. We know how to be Christians in a cultural sort of way. We go to church on church day; we consult our pastors and priests for baptisms and burials, etc. But we do not permit our faith into our homes and kitchens, our board rooms and work places. We “do church” on Sunday morning. But by Monday we are on our own.
We need nomadic adventurers in America, too. We need hardy folk willing to live what they believe. And not only on Sunday. But in the modern, suburban “gers” where they live. In the offices and factories where they work. In the end, it is the only way to grow deep as we grow broad. I wonder who is up to it?